In the digital age, organizations increasingly rely on digitally-stored data. To protect against data loss, an organization may use a backup system to back up important data. Traditional backup systems may periodically create a full backup by capturing all files of a volume. Between full backups, a backup system may capture intermediate backups, referred to as incremental backups, which include files that have changed since the previous incremental or full backup. An incremental backup may be orders of magnitude smaller and faster than a full backup.
Unfortunately, backup systems may consume significant amounts of computing resources. For instance, a full backup may include millions of files, and a traditional backup system may store and index the metadata of each file in a backup. As traditional backup systems may create frequent (e.g., weekly) full backups of a volume, the indexes of backed up file metadata alone may consume significant amounts of storage space. Furthermore, because file metadata may infrequently change between full backups, a large portion of the information in file metadata indexes may be duplicative. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for indexing backup file metadata.